Author Archives: John Tuerck

In the year of the well-publicized woes of Enron, Arthur Andersen and WorldCom, Virginia juries punished fraudulent behavior with three of the largest verdicts in 2002. Of the year’s largest verdicts, the fraud cases — including the runaway top verdict, ...

An Alexandria jury awarded the largest verdict in Virginia history when it found that an online tutoring company had defrauded 13 investors and sales consultants. The jury found that TutorNet.com Inc., a Northern Virginia company, misrepresented its financial strength and ...

Tying a record for personal injury verdicts in Virginia, a Portsmouth jury awarded $60 million in August to a North Carolina man who suffered a severe brain injury when his car was struck head-on by a delivery van in Suffolk. ...

In November, a federal jury in Richmond ordered the Canadian company that manufactures the popular BlackBerry handheld e-mail device to pay Virginia-based NTP Inc. $23.1 for infringing on eight of the Virginia company’s patents. NTP had claimed that the Canadian ...

A wrathful Richmond jury hit a group of local religious figures with an $8.57 million verdict for defrauding investors in an elaborate Ponzi scheme. Drawing on their links to area churches, the group touted an “investment debenture program” that promised ...

Continuing the trend of increasing wrongful death verdicts, a Newport News jury awarded $6.36 million to the mother of an infant who died of an aneurysm not long after the child’s birth. During her third pregnancy, the woman, a stay-at-home ...

A mother can amend her wrongful death suit to include a punitive damages claim against the college where her son committed suicide, a federal district judge has ruled. The plaintiff’s claim for punitives centered on her assertion that college officials ...

An apartment-complex owner that failed to pay a $4,400 buyout fee to a temporary agency eventually paid $52,200 to settle the agency’s breach-of-contract and business-conspiracy claim. The temp agency had placed an employee to manage the apartment complex. At some ...

Looking to boost the participation of Fairfax lawyers in the selection and retention of judges, the Fairfax Bar Association has developed electronic judicial screening and evaluation forms. With more lawyers taking part in the process, bar officials hope to have ...